The great Book Messe is the autumn opener for me. As showers and brown leaves gust across the huge fairground, I seized the hour for bier and knackwurst, and contemplated the future in the light of a kindly young woman having stood up on the Pendelbus to allow my ancient self, lame of leg and rheumy of eye, to sit down. Having concluded that this was evidence that the human race has hope, I had another bier.

Yet despite this blip, the highlight of the fair for me was not a book or a party, though plenty of both were in evidence, but an interesting conversation with a group who really knew what they were talking about at one of the International Friday conference sessions. Here, in the Production stream (how very strange it now seems to call data part of “Production”!) we did a session on Discoverability and Metadata. As speakers we had Jason Markos, Director of Knowledge Management at Wiley to get us started, followed by Timo Hannay, CEO of Macmillan Digital Science; Dr Sven Fund, CEO of De Gruyter; and, to keep us technologically honest, Andreas Blumauer, CEO of Vienna’s Semantic Web company. So, a mass of talent from whom came massive elucidation of what I take to be a critical developmental issue for STM today and the rest of the information marketplace tomorrow. The problem of knowledge. The problem that when we have solved the knowledge problem, will we ex-publishing groundlings still be needed?

Jason got us afloat in a very admirable way. As we move from a world of documents and segments of former documents (book, journal and article moving to lower levels of granularity – abstract, reference, citation) – so we eventually recognize that entity extraction and text enrichment become ways of interconnecting thoughts and ideas horizontally in knowledge structures that represent the discovery of new insights that were not effectively available in the years when we were searching documents for word matches. Once we are underlining meaning with a range of possibilities and allowing semantic web analysis to use knowledge of meaning in context to illuminate underlying thinking (along with what is not on the page but is implied by what we have read or written), then we are into a Knowledge game which moves past content and beyond data and into some very new territory.

Companies like Wiley and Macmillan and Elsevier and Springer will exploit this very effectively using their own content. In disciplines like chemistry, building knowledge stores and allowing researchers to archive both effective and failed discovery work will become commonplace. Extended metadata will take us beyond the descriptive towards recording analytics and following knowledge pathways. People like Timo will create the knowledge – based infrastructure that allows this to become a part of the workflow of science. Sven will keep our feet on the ground by ensuring that we do not try to sell concepts before users are ready, and Andreas will help us to master the disciplines of the semantic web – and then, just as I was padding round the audience with a microphone picking up some really interesting questions, our little theatre was over, we could strut and fret no more and the audience could escape from Frankfurt’s economy drive of the year – no wifi in conference spaces!

So I was left on the Pendelbus and under the biergarten tarpaulin to ponder the impact of all of this. In the self-publishing future, when scholars publish straight to figstore and F1000 does post-publication peer review, the data to be organized will have to be collected. Indeed current Open Access has already begun the fragmentation. As knowledge structures grow, some scholars will demand that, except in extreme circumstances, they will never see primary text, but work only on advanced, knowledge-infused metadata. Further, that metadata will have to cover everything relevant to the topic. Will the lions and lambs of Elsevier and Wiley, Springer and Macmillan, lie down with each other and co-operate, or will external metadata harvesting become a new business, over the heads of primary content players. And will it be professional bodies like ACS or RCS who do this – or technology players? Knowing where everything is, being able to visualize its relationships with everything else, and being able to organize universal knowledge searching may be a different business from the historical publishing/information model. And the metadata that matters in this context? Who owns it may be a matter of the context in which it is collected. Certainly owning the underlying content would seem to give that owner very few rights to ownership of metadata derived from enquiries and research that included it, yet here I predict future sturm and drang as publishers seek to own and control the extension of metadata into the knowledge domain. And if these are autumnal topics, what can winter be like when it comes?

There have been gathering warnings all through the autumn. Now a realization is beginning to form, we can look back and see how it crystalized, and what it may mean. But the underlying message is clear: the power of advertising as a media business model is broken, and will never return with the same force. How do I know? Well, for a start, I heard Chuck Richards, Outsell’s B2B analyst, say that the B2B market would become overwhelmingly “pull” based: we are looking, in the view of the least alarmist commentator that I know, at a world where conventional display and banner advertising will disappear. I sat still for an hour after hearing this thinking of all the precursor events that I knew about and trying to put them in order.

For a start, digital advertising revenues, though trumpeted by anxious media owners, show no signs of returning to either pre-recession or pre-digital levels. Anywhere, not just B2B. So with print diminishing and digital ads becoming a lowly priced commodity, the influence of advertising of any sort on network-based business modes is in retreat. Indeed, the interesting marketplace in advertising suppressants tells an aligned story. Lets take AdTrap (http://www.getadtrap.com/) as a typical example. This is not even software to block advertising, but a hardware-based solution that stands between the server and the modem – and edits web pages. Notice its angle of approach: “a small price to pay to lose intrusive advertising and videos – and have web pages that load more quickly and easily” seems to paraphrase the message. Now keep looking and you will find that Yellow Page style advertising has almost gone, that print is discounting heavily to offset falling circulations. Only television seems secure…or does it? Programme making power seems to be moving from the traditional (cable) networks and franchise holders towards “made for download” TV. The new powers will soon be Netflix and its imitators, and we shall be talking about the Game of Thrones content creation model. Everything here speaks to sponsorship: nothing supports the intrusive intervention of “message breaks” filled with minutes of surplus to requirements video drizzle.

But surely the mighty advertising world will not take this sitting down? Well, I was ticked off recently for referring to WPP as an ad agency: I should have said “marketing and data analytics” company or some sort. Omnicom and Publicis are now engaged to be married: is this a merger of strengths or a way of disguising weakness? Certainly the elan of an industry which, in its 1950s manifestation was a billboard for the confidence and prosperity of a recovering post-war world, now looks fragile and faces real issues in this slow post-recession recovery. Creatives are still a high value commodity, but the world of PR and advertising built on campaign planning and tactical development and space booking can normally be performed by the workflow tools installed on the laptop of the lowliest marketing assistant working for the big brand owners And the brands are more likely to have the data required for higher level analytics – and to invest in it.

So brand management, like the rest of us, looks to lose cost and gain in productivity terms. And all the tools are there to do the job, though they do not present themselves, for obvious reasons, as ways of undermining their existing clients in advertising and PR. Companies like Gorkana and Cision have moved from their historic base in the news clipping services – a dull necessity for ad agencies who needed “voucher” as proof of ad publication and clippings as a oemonstration of launch and PR impact. These players have now become bedrock workflow tools that also enable the migration of PR and advertising back in house, with only the creative elements remaining to be subcontracted.

What then replaces push advertising? Part on the answer lies with social media, with its ability at once to allow brands to create word of mouth interest, and its hugely powerful position as the Recommendation Engine. As social networks get over “big” and return to niche, they will become much more powerful as a source of purchasing impetus. “We need to replace the fridge – who recently bought one…? Why are half of my friends on Apple and half on Samsung…?”. “Here’s a link to where we bought them…” And this works as well in B2B niche sector business and professional networks. This is where users learn to go to Capterra and other niche listing, recommendations and comparison sites. And here is where wholly new buying relationships are going to be forged.

When I began as a young publisher one of my first responsibilities was the Nelson Classics, wonderful mini-editions of classic novels in a small format that had flourished before the First World War under the editorial direction of John Buchan. Of course, by my day they had been swamped by Penguin and the age of the paperback. One thing that I noted was that while Penguins advertised other Penguins, my back pages were a messy swamp of advertisements for liver pills, Dr Collis Browne’s patented cures and other matter thought useful, no doubt, for constipated and otherwise afflicted readers. At one time, the book was thought to be a place for push advertising, and just as it has so certainly retreated from the book, e or otherwise, our children will be surprized when they reflect that it was once an expected feature of magazines, newspapers, networked media and mobile devices.


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